1. Ok, so I think I understand the idea of it all, but it all just seems to be so gross! I definitely wouldn't want to do this by hand--are we going to use computers when we deal with the RSA? If we are, I'll probably need some pointers on how to write it into SAGE. I can pretty easily see how this relates to what we've recently covered, but the numbers are much larger now, so it seems unlikely to me that we'll solve these by hand. If we do plan to solve these by hand, I suppose I'd be able to understand it well enough to do it for smaller primes p and q.
2. How do people even come up with this? It really is pretty brilliant. I especially like how they explain what is happening in a non-mathematical way first as it helps me get a better context for conceptual understanding of the system's efforts. I guess I really wonder what we plan to do with it now though. Are we going to play with RSA on the computer to send or receive secure messages, encoding them and decoding them? Are we going to do it by hand with smaller primes? It's definitely important to know about since it has so many applications today, but what can I consciously do with it?
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